


Pieces

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [102]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Autobiographical Elements, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Episode: s01e06 And the Sky Full of Stars, Episode: s04e16 Exercise of Vital Powers, Fix-It, Flashbacks, Gen, Heavily Autobiographical, Intergenerational Memory, Interpersonal Memory, Memory, Nightmares, POV First Person, PTSD, Psi Corps, Psychological Trauma, Sacrifice, Slice of Life, Telepath culture, What Really Happened to Al Bester?, Worldbuilding, memory transference, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-13 15:02:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14114901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Reflections on memory transference and PTSD.





	Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> The prologue of _Behind the Gloves_ is [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10153487) \- please read!
> 
> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

_Zack: You'll go into his head, look around, see if you can help him remember anything. If you can pull a visual ID on the guy, we'll have you do a lineup and take it from there._

_Lyta: Standard commission. Plus 10 percent stress fee if I have to relive the attack._

_Zack: Done. Just let me tell him we're coming._

\- Exercise of Vital Powers

\----------

_Talia: Years ago I was assigned to scan a suspect in a murder case on Mars. He was a serial killer. I had never been inside a mind like that. His thoughts were brutal, violent, terrible. It was the most frightening experience. I still have nightmares about it._

\- And the Sky Full of Stars

\----------

_"May I tell you a story, Al?" Ms. Chastain sipped her lemon tea and nudged the plate of gingersnaps toward him. He took one._

_"Yes, please."_

_"This is about my grandmother. She was a telepath, like me. ... One day, when my mother was just five years old, some normals came to the church and they burned it. And they took all of the priests who were teeps, and they took my grandmother, and they tied heavy weights on all of them and dropped them in the ocean. My mother was there, but she was hiding, and from where she was, she felt my grandmother drown._

_"She kept that feeling in her heart, and when I got old enough, she passed it on to me. It was awful, Alfred, but I know why she did it. She did it to remind me, always, that we aren't like normal people. Even if we try to pretend we are, the normals will remind us."_

\- Deadly Relations, p. 15 (Bester is five, almost six by telepath age reckoning)

\----------

_He awoke screaming, as he often did. The phantasms of night came with him to the waking world, and for long moments he remained surrounded by them, frantically trying to understand where he was, to banish the faces he had never known, the memories that weren't his._

_..._

_[He and Alisha married.] And his nightmares retreated, though they didn't go away. Alisha didn't ask about them, though he was sure she knew._

_They changed, his nightmares, even as they lessened in intensity. For some time he had been haunted by fragments of the lives of those he scanned._

\- Deadly Relations, p. 173, 179 (Bester is 33 or 34)

\----------

_"I'll be all right in a moment. Just - give me a moment." It felt as if something had been cut out of him, something he couldn't even remember anymore. Was it true, what they said? That a part of your soul went with those who died? How much of him was left?_

_Later, on the plane back to Geneva, he felt better. It was Khol's loss he felt, her trauma. The illusion of damage had been just that, an illusion.  
_

\- Deadly Relations, p. 184 (Bester is 33 or 34)

\----------

_[Bester wakes screaming after a nighmare brought on by the fragments he still carries of Byron]_

_"Monsieur Kaufman? Are you okay? ... I heard you in here shouting as if you had seen a Drakh. I thought you were in trouble - now I see it must have merely been a bad dream."_

_"Yes," Bester confirmed. "A bad dream. I'm sorry, it was just confusing, to wake and find you there, especially after that nightmare."_

_"You have many nightmares?"_

_"I have my share."_

\- Final Reckoning, p. 40 (Bester is in his early 80s)

\----------

It's been said that having PTSD is like having a demon-self following you around everywhere, intent on destroying your life and your relationships - a "monster" that used to be a part of yourself, but which you can't ever banish, because it still is.

Integrate him? _Maybe_.

The "monster in the back seat." Watching you. Mocking you. Insulting you. Haunting you.

And that's how it can be for those who've survived some horror themselves, those to whom it directly happened.

But we're telepaths - and nothing is ever so "simple" with us.

We also carry fragments of others.

Any memories, of course, can transfer - good, neutral, bad, factual, emotional, visual, and so on - but trauma memories are different. Trauma memories aren't encoded the same ways in our brains. They're not held the same way in our minds. During trauma, minds split apart, they dissociate, they fragment.

Tiny pieces. Sharp edges.

After having been in others' minds, we can wake up some day to find we're carrying _pieces_ of other people, embedded in us.

Mental shrapnel.

Sometimes, such pieces are given to us intentionally, as Ms. Chastain's mother passed such memories to her, as a warning, as a lesson. To help keep her safe from the horrors of the world.

Sometimes, we absorb them as a consequence of our work - scanning injured or dying people, for instance, or scanning suspects and witnesses.

In those cases, we usually know the _context_ of the memories - whose they are, what happened, when it happened, why it happened - at least until there's just so much of it in us, from so many people, that everything runs together in a blur of faces, places, emotions, and other fragments. (See the example above, before Bester married Alisha, in his nightmares. This is most likely to happen to people who have to scan _many_ people in  _many_ violent contexts.)

But the pieces we carry [may also be third-hand](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13867011) \- we may absorb (intentionally or otherwise) memories from other telepaths with whom we are intimate, fragments that may be more distant and come to us without context, but with all the pain. In those cases, it may be impossible to ascertain the exact origins of the pieces, other than in vague terms (e.g. "Someone my ex scanned and possibly had to kill.").

"Oh fuck it - whoever this once belonged to, it's mine _now_."

Whatever once happened, we're the ones reliving the attack _now_. We're the ones with the nightmares _now_.

Years later. Decades later. Over and over.

We're the ones seeing a trigger and flashing back, crying in a heap on the floor. We're the ones peeling out of the world and watching ourselves from a distance. We're the ones staring into the darkest abyss, terrified of falling into it and never being able to get out.

Shaking. Crying. Throwing up. Running for the toilet. Lying in bed, unable to sleep.

We're the ones looking out at the world through a lens of shattered glass, seeing blood seeping through the cracks.

But we carry on.

We pick ourselves up and go on with our lives. We do our jobs.

Everyone carries something, right?

Psi Cops can't show weakness in front of _anyone_.

Business and court telepaths could find themselves deemed medically unfit, and fired.

At the very least, no one wants the _pity of normals_. That's worse than the flashbacks.

\-----

The path to recovery is different, too.

Just like normals, not all of us seek help, either for our own traumas, or for the traumas we absorb from others.

Some [self-medicate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10816800/chapters/23998290). Some do deathbed scans and try to kill off parts of ourselves permanently. (The Corps usually doesn't let anyone do more than four, but Bester, after the trauma of learning his parentage, got around the rules and did eight - the most ever - not so much actively "trying to kill himself" but putting himself in more and more dangerous contexts, in the name of sacrifice for the Corps, in the hope that the universe would off him. And he almost succeeded on that eighth scan.)

Others do seek help. But the path to recovery isn't the same when the traumas originate with others. These fragments never "broke off" from us in the first place - so "reintegration" can't be the goal, but some other relationship. For some transferred trauma, we were never personally there when these things happened. Sometimes, these incidents didn't happen even to people we've ever met (as I showed in [Through Her Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13867011)).

How do we talk about "the event," if we were the ones who caused that piece of trauma in the first place (e.g. a Psi Cop talking about a mission), whatever the other people had done to make that mission necessary?

How do we talk about "the event," when what we've got is an out-of-order mash up of the violent deaths of a killer's victims - through the killer's eyes - and all inadmissible in court?

And how do we talk about "the event" when we may have no idea to whom something happened, or the full context in which it did? When we don't know if it's a single event or a mixture of many events, running together?

Don't we need to know (as much as possible) about what happened? At the very least, we need to recognize we're carrying others' memories, and to be able to distinguish the memories that come from our own lives from those that do not.

We face some of the same challenges as normals who survive trauma, but there are also some differences.

In the end, while PTSD can be like having a monster in the back seat (and the "monster" is you), telepathy complicates everything. Even if we've never survived combat, or an attack, or sexual abuse, even if we've never directly witnessed some horror, we may nonetheless find our minds filled with shrapnel.

We may find ourselves bleeding from wounds other people suffered.

(Maybe wounds we had to give them.)

Our back seats may or may not have monsters of our own, shadows of ourselves - but eventually, they fill up with _pieces_ _of other people's monsters_ , pieces we probably can't return, or banish, even if we wanted to.

Entering the Corps from a normal family is hard at any age, whether you're thirteen or thirty-five - and you may put on gloves and think you "get it," but I think you never really "get" what life's like behind the gloves until your back seat is filled with pieces.

Badges of sacrifice.

Battle scars.

Restless ghosts.

Just a fang. Just a claw.

Just the memory of knowing someone's coming to kill you.

(Isn't that worth more than a one-time 10% "stress fee"?)

**Author's Note:**

> It's complicated because both normals and telepaths can experience trauma from events they either physically experienced or personally witnessed, but telepaths can also experience PTSD symptoms from a wider sphere of exposure - including fragments of the lives of people they scanned, fragments of the lives of people they've been intimate with, and fragments of the lives of others (third parties) that are carried by those they've scanned or have been intimate with.
> 
> This experience of transferred trauma has a personal component, as well as an interpersonal and wider cultural component. It's not "intrinsic" to being telepathic that these things happen with such frequency (or at all); it's the product of an ongoing culture of violence against telepaths (by normals), and of a culture that directly or indirectly forces telepaths into violent confrontations with each other, and into direct contact with the violent memories of normals (for the benefit of normals).


End file.
